“Be not distressed. I will leave my own son here as a hostage while thou art away. Feriz will occupy thy dungeon, he will watch over thy children, and not let them be afraid. Hasten now and take leave of them.”
Dame Béldi rushed to the round window. Loudly sobbing, she called her children one by one, and then embraced them all as best she could. The cold iron bars stood between her breast and theirs. The tears of their weeping faces could not dissolve them.
“Give this kiss to father!—And this kiss from me!—And this from me!” lisped the children, putting their little arms round their mother’s neck through the bars.
“My child, my good Aranka!” said Dame Béldi to the girl, who being about fifteen or sixteen was the eldest of them all; “look after thy little brothers and sisters! And you, my good little lads, comfort Aranka. God bless you! God defend you! One more kiss, Aranka! And one more for you, little David?”
“Madame, time is passing, and Paul Béldi is waiting for thee to open his prison!” intervened Kucsuk Pasha, withdrawing Dame Béldi from the window of her children’s prison, who thereupon turned her tear-stained face towards Feriz Beg, and in a passion of grief flung herself on the youth’s neck, and said to him in a voice almost indistinguishable for her sobbing:
“Thou noble heart! promise me that thou wilt love my children when I am far away!”
“By Allah, I swear it!” exclaimed the youth, pressing to his bosom the poor woman who was half-fainting for sorrow, “I swear that I will love them forever!”
Ah! there was one among them whom he had already loved for a long, long time.
“Hasten, lady!” urged the Pasha; “cast this mantle over thee, and place this turban on thy head that the guards may not recognise thee in the distance. The way is long, the time is short.”
“God be with you, God be with you!” sobbed Dame Béldi, casting with tremulous hands hundreds of kisses towards her children, who waved their goodbyes to her from their window and then, violently repressing her emotion, she rushed from the dungeon.
Kucsuk Pasha pressed the hand of his son in silence, and left him in Dame Béldi’s room.
The children kept on weeping behind their window.
The youth drew nearer to them.
“Weep not,” he said cheerfully, “your mother will soon come again and bring your father with her, and then you will all rejoice together.”
“Ah, but then they’ll kill father!” sobbed one of the children timidly.
“So long as Feriz Beg can use his sword none shall touch Paul Béldi,” cried the youth, with flashing eyes. “My sword and my father’s will flash around him, his enemies will be my enemies. Fear not! when I get back my sword, I will win back his liberty with it.”
“I thank you, I thank you,” whispered a gentle voice overcome by emotion.
Feriz Beg recognised the silvery voice of Aranka, and the weeping blue eyes of the seraph face which regarded him, like Heaven after rain, flashed upon him a burning ray of gratitude which was to haunt him in his dreams and in his memory forever.
Feriz felt his heart leap with a great joy. Pressing close up to the prison bars that he might get as close to the girl as possible he said to her with a tender voice:
“How happy I am now that we dwell together as neighbours in the same dungeon, but oh, how much happier shall we be when no doors are closed upon us? Let me then have a place beside thy hearth and within thy heart!”
The fair, sad girl, with a face full of foreboding, stretched through the bars of the dungeon a hand whiter than a lily, whiter than snow. Feriz Beg solemnly raised it to his lips and falling on his knees, in an outburst of sublime devotion touched his lips and his forehead with that beloved hand.
XXV
The Husband
At the very hour when Kucsuk Pasha arrived at Stambul, Master Ladislaus Székely, whom Master Michael Teleki had sent with rich presents to the Porte, likewise dismounted from his carriage. It was his mission to win the favour of the infuriated Grand Vizier and the Pashas, who had again begun violently to urge Paul Béldi to accept the princely throne.
Master Ladislaus Székely had also brought with him Zülfikar to be his guide and interpreter through the tortuous streets of Stambul.
As we already know, this worthy gentleman’s particular hobby was the collection of jewels, and the Prince had sent through him such a heap of precious stones that the heart of the good gentleman when he saw them all spread out before him died away within him at the thought that the whole collection was ruthlessly to be broken up and distributed among a lot of foreigners and Pashas.
“What a shame to lose them all,” he thought. “And even then who knows whether we shall be safe after all. It is like casting pearls before swine. A much quicker way would be to get Master Paul Béldi assassinated. That would be cutting the knot once for all, and we should have no further danger from that quarter. Michael Teleki wouldn’t kill me for a trifle like that, I know. You, Zülfikar, my son, could you undertake to poison someone?” he inquired, turning towards the renegade.
“The whole town if you like.”
“No, only Master Paul Béldi. It is all one to him whether he dies or remains a prisoner for life.”
“I’ll do it for two hundred ducats, if you pay me half in advance.”
“I’ll pay you, Zülfikar, but how will you get at him?”
“That’s my affair, all you have to do is to get the money ready.”
Accordingly Ladislaus Székely gave the earnest-money to the renegade, and the renegade went home and wrote a letter in the name of the Beglerleg of the following tenor: “Be assured that our affairs are in the
